by Louise Ure
“That rules out I-17 to Flagstaff,” Nellis said. “But it still leaves us with either I-10 toward Blythe or northwest on Highway 60. They both parallel railroad tracks. Is there anything else?”
Cadence counted the dots again. “About five or ten minutes farther on, I heard race car engines. Not like go-karts or kids having a sideshow, I mean real race engines. Meaty, growling, like NASCAR engines or something. I guess I was concentrating so hard on counting breaths that I forgot it.”
“PIR!” Nellis said. Phoenix International Raceway was just off I-10 in Avondale. He started the car again and headed west. Fifteen minutes later they exited the freeway where Cadence told them to and jogged left and right through an old subdivision to an area where the houses were scruffier and farther apart.
“Okay, we’re looking for a long driveway on the right. Not paved, but definitely smooth. I think he was in a mobile home and it had a shaded front porch. He had a motorcycle and there was a fountain not far away.”
The first two driveways they turned into yielded nothing. Nellis drove through overhanging mesquite trees and pulled the car to a stop at the end of the third driveway.
“Does this one seem familiar?”
“I don’t…I don’t…Wait a minute. I don’t remember tree branches brushing the roof of the car. This isn’t it.”
“Would you even have heard them from the trunk?” Dupree asked. “There’s a metal shed here that might have sounded like a trailer. We’ll check it out.”
He and Nellis circled around the rusted metal toolshed, guns drawn and held down by their legs. No signs of life, either at the storage shed or the bigger residential house a hundred yards away.
The shed was unlocked. The detectives bracketed the door and opened it with a slam. “Police! Come out with your hands up!”
No response. Dupree chanced a glance inside. A snow cone of pea gravel on the floor. Rusted rakes, a shovel, and a posthole digger leaned against the wall. No sign that Marty or his prisoner had ever been here.
By the sixth driveway, the panic was rising in Moran’s voice. “We’ve got to go back to the freeway. We screwed up somewhere. Hurry!”
“We’re close, Cadence. I can feel it.” Dupree believed in her glue system and her calculations.
The seventh driveway led into a small mobile home park with a dilapidated swayback trailer at the end of the court. As they idled in the turnaround area in front of the trailer, Moran rolled down the car window.
“Two tiers of falling water, the fountain sounds right. Is there a bird-of-paradise by the front door? And a pineapple sage?”
“It’s not much of a fountain. More like a big metal birdbath. And I’ve got no idea what that second plant looks like, but there’s a bird-of-paradise,” Dupree said.
“Use your nose. Does it smell like pineapples?”
Dupree got out of the car and, glancing at the mobile homes on each side to see if his movements were being detected, walked up to the front door and inhaled deeply. Pineapple: the smell of the islands. When he got back to the car, Nellis was hanging up the radio mike.
“The owner is listed as Anton Gregory. He’s a biker, and he’s got a record. Maybe Marty is staying with him or renting the place.”
Dupree motioned the officers from the two patrol cars following them to fan out on either side of the trailer. He and Nellis approached the front door and knocked hard on the metal siding. “Police!”
A muffled greeting from inside, like that of an old dog left too long by himself. He didn’t bark.
Dupree returned to the car and opened the back door for Moran. She snagged her foot in a red shop rag on the ground and bent down to pick it up. She held the cloth to her face and breathed in. “This is it.”
“There’s no one here. We’ll leave officers to watch for him, and put an APB out.”
Moran turned her head left and right, then pointed back to the entrance to the long driveway.
“There. That way. Maybe five hundred yards. Marty said he drove a Harley, and that’s a Harley.”
Dupree could hear it now, too. The junkyard-dog-grab-you-by-the-balls thunder of modified Harley pipes, revving up and moving away to the south. He motioned to the cops in the last car. “Let’s go! Nellis, you stay here with the other car in case he circles back!”
He threw himself into the patrol car’s backseat and they took off, spitting sand and gravel as they turned. The bike was moving south, about a quarter mile ahead of them now. It looked like the rider was alone, but from this angle Dupree couldn’t tell if he had a little girl straddling the gas tank in front of him and clutching his chest.
They accelerated, moving past sixty…then seventy. Dangerous speeds on a thin rural road.
“Watch out!” The motorcycle slued left, trying to avoid an old pickup truck nosing out of a driveway on the right. The front wheel jigged from side to side, the rider overcorrecting in his panic.
Dupree gasped as the bike slid sideways, the rider’s leg caught between asphalt and metal.
The patrol car screeched to a halt beside the downed motorcycle and Dupree ran to the man on the ground. He was as big as a buffalo, greasy hair to his shoulders, and tattoos like dark lace across his chest and arms. His left arm was bent at an impossible angle but his right hand was still on the gas. Dupree shut the bike down.
“Where is she? Where’s the little girl?”
“Back at the trailer, man.” Marty Pickett let his head fall back to the pavement.
Nellis used a tire iron from the patrol car to lever open the trailer door. He was the first one inside, but Moran pushed past the other officers to join him.
“Teresa!”
A buried, swaddled sound and thumping came from the bedroom. Wrenching open the narrow closet door, Nellis unlocked the makeshift cage that made up the bottom third of the space. Teresa’s hands, feet, and mouth were bound with duct tape and her eyes were wide with terror, but she seemed otherwise unharmed.
“He said my new daddy was coming to get me,” Dupree overheard her tell Cadence Moran in the back of the police car. Even the blind woman’s strong arms couldn’t stop her trembling.
He waited until the paramedics arrived and they were moving the girl into an ambulance.
“How’d you know it was Marty Pickett’s Harley?” he asked Moran.
“That cloth smelled like him so I knew we were in the right place. I was just hoping it was the right Harley out there.” She paused for a swig of water. “But I’m glad I finally found a use for my cousin’s Guidelines for Being Able to Move Away From Home.”
Dupree pretended that he knew what she meant.
Chapter 101
That night, when I was back in Tucson with an ice bag on my packed nose and cooling salve on my bruises, I celebrated with all the people who were important to me, and one who wasn’t important anymore.
Juanita and Brodie flanked me on the couch, but Teresa and Bernadette were the ones who wouldn’t leave my side. I cuddled and cooed until I felt like a mother mourning dove, and Emily snapped pictures as they kissed me.
Kevin had his broken leg propped up on the coffee table and had switched from beer to champagne in celebration. I was celebrating too, with the coldest glass of water I’d ever tasted.
My mother was there, eschewing the champagne for the bottle of gin she’d brought over for herself. “You never should have gotten involved, Cadence. You put my grandniece’s life in jeopardy. I would never have forgiven you if something had happened to her.”
We could all share in the blame for this one. Not just Gerald Pickett, a young man so desperate to shed his own skin that he would not only kill, but also be killed, in the process. So ready to prove his love that what he demonstrated was hate. And not just Beatrice McDougall, evil as she was. There were others to be added to the list.
Dupree and Nellis came in late, when the party had settled into self-congratulatory murmurs and recounted tales, not all of them true. My mind was already editing my performa
nce: erasing the shakes and terrors, and cranking up the volume on the escape. As usual in the retelling: the hero of my own story.
Funny that we take credit, snatching it before it can get away, but we accept blame, holding it close only when no other arms reach for it.
Dupree, with his sweet gospel voice, probably already knew about handling blame and loss, but I didn’t know how he would deal with the death of Darren Toller. Toller was as much an innocent victim as my Teresa, or Wanda Prentice.
Dupree and Nellis told us about the rat maze investigation that had led, too late, to Gerald Pickett. About Priscilla Strout’s extracurricular sex and petty thefts, and a pharmacist named Stephanos who stole money from both insurance companies and the elderly. About an anonymous young girl in a ghost town, whose family would never know that she was gone.
Darren Toller was part of that confusion, and that was my fault. I’d sent the police down that path and it had cost Darren Toller his life.
“Do you have proof that Pickett was behind it all?” I asked Dupree.
“His prints match what you and Juanita found on Mrs. Prentice’s front window, and the Bible Gum cards at McDougall’s house. Once the DNA testing is done, I’m sure that will match too.”
Plenty of proof. Too late.
“But we found a partial print from Beatrice McDougall on Pickett’s knife too. It was made when Wanda Prentice’s blood was still wet. Beatrice is responsible for at least one of these killings herself.” Dupree paused. “She’s pregnant, you know. That’s why she and Gerald had to get away. They couldn’t let her father know.”
Beatrice was going to have a chance to disprove her father’s “bad seed” philosophy, after all. But she’d be doing it from a jail cell, watching from afar as someone else raised her child.
“There’s no proof she participated in her father’s death, but she’s being charged with the murders of Wanda Prentice and the pilot and the man in Winterhaven. The county attorney wants to try her as an adult,” Dupree said.
How strange that her father wouldn’t treat her as an adult, but the state would.
Dupree said his good-byes, telling us he was anxious to get back to the hospital and his daughter. He told us about the motorcycle accident and said her boyfriend was going to make it but would never be the same man he’d been before. “Did I tell you they only had fresh vegetables and skim milk in that bag of groceries they were carrying? I may have to give Spider a little more credit in the future.” I heard commitment in Dupree’s voice, and maybe the desire to right a wrong he never thought he’d have the chance to correct.
“Did you find Priscilla Strout yet?” Brodie asked.
Nellis gave a sour laugh. “Yeah. She didn’t want to split her inheritance with Arlen, so she got Randy Owner to drive her up to Las Vegas to get a divorce. And Owner, who thought we were on to his Corvette thefts again, was happy to get out of town.”
Nellis asked me to close my eyes—the ultimate redundancy—then placed a wrapped package in my hands. I tore off the tissue paper to find a pair of sequined cat’s-eye glasses. “New sunglasses,” he explained. “You see better than some sighted people I know, so I thought your sunglasses should be flashier.”
Given where we’d started, I took that as a compliment.
Brodie excused himself and went out to the car to get what he called my “homecoming present.” The screen door slapped behind him when he returned, and my homecoming present announced herself with a sharp bark.
“This is Haley. She’s a ten-week-old Lab and retriever mix and a washout from the Seeing Eye dog program ’cause she’s deaf. I thought she could use a friend.”
A deaf dog and a blind woman? It sounded like we’d both be learning some new tricks. “I think we were made for each other.”
Brodie was the last to leave, promising with a scratch behind Haley’s ear and a kiss on my cheek that he’d be back with coffee and Krispy Kreme doughnuts in the morning.
Haley dozed on my lap and I tested the silence. It had a hollow, empty ache to it, the way the air can feel when a loud bell stops ringing. I ran my fingers through the puppy’s feather-light hair.
Blame was the bitter brew at our communal trough, and I drank deeply. It didn’t matter whether we were blind or sighted. Intuitive or scientific. None of us got it right. We followed the trail but failed to solve it in time. We dug through evidence but didn’t discover anything. We proved but could not prevent. We even learned the killer’s name but may never really understand what made him kill. Like a desert tarantula, he left no footprints in his passage.
All of it, all of it—too little, too late.
I’d done my best, and someday soon that would give me solace.
But the wind was picking up. And I swear I could hear the leaves of the Fault Tree rustling.
More from Louise Ure
“Cements Ure’s position alongside such psychological-thriller masters as Ruth Rendell and Minette Walters.” —Booklist
Liars Anonymous
Just because you’re not guilty doesn’t mean you’re innocent.
Jessie Dancing got away, but she can’t escape her past. She works at a call center, for roadside emergency assistance. One night, she gets a call from Darren Markson, who sounds like he is being murdered. After telling the local police, Jessie starts her own investigation into the possible crime, finding Markson’s family, discovering that Markson is still alive. Answering one question for Jessie only raises three more, and the answers are growing more personal…
The lines between guilt and innocence blur as Jessie’s past, the crimes she may have committed, the murder she may have gotten away with, come back to haunt her. This taut, psychological thriller shows an award-winning author at peak talent, painting a disturbing portrait of a heroine with her own moral compass—and a history she cannot escape.
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